You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Fake News.
I hate the appellation.
Fake News!
2 words that question everything I do every day of my life.
While I hate Fake News, I have bowed down to the thought that in some arenas, it’s accurate.
Ok, there, I said it.
And somewhere Edward R. Murrow is spinning in his grave.
I am a journalistic connoisseur. I am trained, I am grizzled, I am knowledgeable in the ways of factual dissemination.
I have broadcast thousands of stories.
Every day is hard. Find a story, get that story on air. Make sure that story is unique and well told and informative.
but most of all: MAKE SURE THE STORY IS ACCURATE AND WITHOUT BIAS.
It’s a hard job with a simple premise.
Get both sides of the story.
Everyone has personal bias.
But rule 1 is keep your damn opinions to yourself.
Opinions belong in a news report like a Hooker belongs in a convent.
Sure I hate. Sure I laugh at the people I interview. Sure I have feelings and thoughts and opinions.
But they don’t end up in my news stew at the end of the day.
If I interview a man charged with raping an infant, a crime so horrible, so abhorrent, I want to rip the man’s eyes out with an ice pick, I publish the facts.
I keep my ice pick, eye ball bursting thoughts to myself.
Can you imagine if I didn’t?
“And Bob, on a final note. I’d simply love to bash this son of a bitches head in with a balpine hammer. Back to you.”
That would be a fall down laughing kind of moment.
But it ain’t gonna happen.
I never even thought about it. I’ve been doing this my whole life.
Fake News?
What the hell is that?
You mean like Saturday Night Live?
But in 2018, things are all different.
Fake News, as disgusting a concept as it is to a journalist, is a real thing.
I have come to the conclusion that national news is no longer news the way Edward R. would want it. Not the way I learned it. Not the kind of news where you present the facts and let the viewers decide what to think for themselves.
Nope. In 2018, I am on record as saying; the National News is controlled. It’s informational filth that targets an audience that is already predisposed to hearing the message it is tuned in to hear.
The news is now fractionalized, and segmented.
Fox News viewers expect their news to be right of center.
CNN News viewers expect their news to be left of center.
It’s why CNN won’t cover a Trump speech live and FOX news will promote the coverage all evening long.
And then there is MSNBC, a wavelength broadcasting to a fringe element that believes radicalization is the only way to save a world swirling around the drain.
To MSNBC, facemask wearing thugs throwing Molotov cocktails through glass windows is not a riot. It is branded as Anti Hate Demonstration.
WTF?
Burning destruction amplified by orchestrated chaos.
ANTI HATE?
CBS, NBC, ABC, and the rest all have their distorted place in the spectrum of truth.
Fair and Balanced is a slogan that sounds good, but no longer exists.
National News is an ice cream store where you can choose the flavor you like.
And like any ice cream on a hot summer day, the melting goo that spills across your hand is a sticky mess.
And so it is with Fake News.
It isn’t so much fake, as it is slanted, colored, biased, massaged.
I am now more certain than ever, after studying my colleagues at the networks, that there is BIAS.
The Networks disseminate controlled images and facts targeting an audience that readily seeks this augmented bias.
It stinks.
It stinks like ass.
Network Journalism is a skunk, bathing in it’s own informational excrement.
The news must be balanced. The news must be free of opinion. The news must be a see saw where an equal weight is placed on both sides of the fulcrum.
News in this day and age is a 500 pound gorilla seated on one side and a 10 pound chimp on the other.
It’s overwhelmingly weighted with one perspective, soiled like a baby’s diaper.
I have watched live feeds of news events for myself.
I have seen how different channels cherry pick one aspect of a 45 minute press conference and then present a single element to a hungry audience that clamors for that specific filament of info.
I have watched how news sausage is made.
Each sausage has a different taste.
Network News is no longer trustworthy. It’s a row boat with a hole rowing into a typhoon.
I watch the news and wonder if it’s worth watching.
The spinning lunacy that is spewed by talking heads on various shades of the broadcast spectrum make it difficult to trust anyone in charge of the message.
Fox News and MSNBC are so diametrically opposed that it is like watching television in two different countries.
The message is convoluted, polluted, distorted and aborted.
Twitter and Facebook feed the fanatical frenzy like horse urine sprayed into a souffle.
I am proud of my chosen calling. I will continue to deliver news in the manner I was trained.
As for my colleagues at the upper echelons of dissemination, you will have to look in your office mirrors and somehow live with yourselves.
Somewhere Edward R. Murrow is sad.
Life’s Crazy™